William Blake d Aug 12 1827. He lived in a world that prized reason, order, moderation—values he disdained. Instead he prized Imagination—not simply creative fancy but Insight: a capacity to see reality in its full spiritual dimension.
Conversation
His art and poetry were the expression of his spiritual vision—a kind of protest against everything acceptable in religion and art in his day: the moralism that passed for virtue; the hypocrisy and dogmatism of organized religion; the ugliness and cruelty of industrialism.
1
2
15
Obsessed by the figure of Christ, he felt that the churches had emptied Christianity of its revolutionary content; they had transformed the gospel into a religion offering little alternative to the spirit-numbing values of the world.
There was much that was peculiar in his vision. Merton: his rebellion “was fundamentally the rebellion of the saints...the rebellion of the lover of the living God,” who shows that the “only way to live is to live in a world that is charged with the presence and reality of God.”
1
4
25